Square Enix does not do a very good job of explaining exactly what the five race chocobo attributes do, and you’re probably wondering exactly what they do, in fact, do. Look no further.
Maximum Speed
Perhaps the most straightforward attribute, Maximum Speed determines how fast your chocobo can potentially go under normal conditions. A chocobo with a maxed-out Maximum Speed stat of 500 can potentially travel approximately 50% faster than a starter chocobo, in normal conditions.
An important thing to know about Maximum Speed is that increasing it without increasing Stamina and Endurance also will cause your stamina efficiency to drop, potentially drastically. Maximum Speed is an important attribute, of course, and is almost always maxed in endgame builds, but unless you invest in Stamina and Endurance as well, you will have to conserve a lot.
Having higher Maximum Speed makes Stamina Tablets better, as it allows you to cover more distance during the 10-second infinite stamina period.
Acceleration
Another fairly straightforward attribute, Acceleration makes your chocobo accelerate faster when the forward key or button is pressed. Ultimately, the amount of time it will take you to reach your maximum speed from your starting speed depends on how high your Acceleration attribute is compared to your Maximum Speed attribute. Low Acceleration and high MS means you’ll take a long time to reach max speed; high Acceleration and low MS means you’ll reach it almost right away.
From a practical standpoint, Acceleration does three things:
- It makes you have a faster start if you don’t have the Head Start ability.
- It makes you less adversely affected by Graviballs, since you accelerate back to your max speed faster after the initial slowdown.
- It makes you less adversely affected by course hazards, since you accelerate back to your max speed faster after the slowdown effect.
It can also occasionally help you get out of an enemy Briar Caltrop faster if it’s really high, but this is usually not terribly reliable.
Acceleration is commonly considered the least important stat on just about any build, so raising it is seldom a priority.
Endurance
Endurance is one of the more complicated attributes, and one for which the official description isn’t that great. It says that it “affects how long your chocobo can run before becoming exhausted.”
Before I tell you what it really does, I’m going to explain the Lathered status and how it relates to stamina consumption, because the two are closely linked.
The Training Course tutorial, along with the Endurance explanation, implies that the Lathered status results from your accelerating for too long. This is misleading: in actuality, you are Lathered if your speed exceeds a certain threshold – which will from now on be called the Lathered threshold. Basically, if you’re going faster than your Lathered threshold allows, you’re Lathered; otherwise, you’re not.
What Endurance does, then, is increase your Lathered threshold. It thereby allows you to go faster without being Lathered.
There’s another important thing about the Lathered status, however: the more your current speed exceeds your Lathered threshold, the more strongly Lathered affects your stamina usage. If you’re just barely over your Lathered threshold, the stamina consumption penalty will be relatively light, but if you’re way over it, your stamina can potentially burn at a ridiculously fast rate.
So basically, this means that Endurance does two things:
- Increases how fast you can go without being Lathered, thereby making you able to go faster while still conserving stamina
- Decreases your stamina usage in general when you’re full-sprinting, since increasing it makes the gap between your Lathered threshold and your maximum speed smaller.
In other words, Endurance is important! It isn’t quite as important as Stamina is for your stamina economy, but it has a noticeable impact on it.
To learn more about the Lathered threshold, see [In-Depth] The Lathered Threshold.
Stamina
Stamina is probably the simplest attribute. It does exactly what it implies it does: it increases the size of your stamina pool, effectively meaning you use less stamina provided all your other attributes remain the same.
Every chocobo’s stamina bar has a numerical value, like HP and MP in the game proper, that is not normally shown, with the percentage being shown instead. Starting chocobos with very low Stamina attributes have just over 1,000 points of stamina. Chocobos with a maximum Stamina attribute of 500 have roughly 2,000 points of stamina. The progression between these is approximately linear. This means that each 100 of the Stamina attribute you get will increase the size of your stamina pool by roughly one fifth of its original value.
Notably, there are a few ability effects which restore a flat amount of stamina measured in points, not percentages, such as Choco Ease, Choco Calm, Choco Reraise, and Choco Drain. Since these are not percentage-based, this basically means that these effects will restore a much lower percentage of your stamina bar if you have a high Stamina attribute. This makes effects such as this more potent in the early game than they are in the endgame.
Notably, increasing your Stamina attribute does not reduce how much Briar Caltrops and Choco Meteors hit you for, as both those items deal stamina damage equal to a percentage of your maximum stamina. It does, however, reduce how much stamina you lose in total as a result of an enemy Bacchus’s Water.
Cunning
Cunning is another stat for which the official description is very misleading. There are a lot of theories about what Cunning does, but most of them incorrectly believe it has something to do with strafing.
It doesn’t. Instead, Cunning improves both your traversal speed and stamina efficiency in certain sections of track which this guide will hereby refer to as rough terrain.
Rough terrain is generally anywhere on the course that is either partially submerged in water or a steep uphill incline.
Considering the layout of each course, that means that Cunning is important in Costa del Sol and Tranquil Paths, but less so in Sagolii Road.
For more information on what exactly is rough terrain and what exactly it does, see [In-Depth] Rough Terrain.
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FFXIV Chocobo Racing 